Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 11.djvu/536

518 types inhabiting barren or inclement localities. Civilized peoples are unlikely to expel the Esquimaux. The Fuegians will probably survive, because their island cannot support a civilized population. It is questionable whether the groups of wandering Semites who have for these thousands of years occupied Eastern deserts will be extruded by societies of higher kinds. And perhaps many steaming malarious regions in the tropics will remain unavailable by races capable of much culture. Hence the domestic, as well as the social, relations proper to the lower varieties of man are not likely to become extinct. Polyandry may survive in Thibet; polygyny may prevail throughout the future in parts of Africa; and, among the remotest groups of hyperboreans, mixed and irregular relations of the sexes will probably continue.

It is possible, too, that in certain regions militancy may persist, and that along with the political relations natural to it there may survive the domestic relations natural to it. Wide tracts, such as those of Northeastern Asia, unable to support populations dense enough to form industrial societies of advanced types, will perhaps remain the habitats of societies having those imperfect forms of state and family which go along with offensive and defensive activities.

Omitting such surviving inferior types, we may here limit ourselves to types carrying further the evolution which civilized nations now show us. Assuming that among these industrialism will increase and militancy decrease, we have to ask what are the domestic relations likely to coexist with complete industrialism.

The monogamic form of the sexual relation is manifestly the ultimate form; and any changes to be anticipated must be in the direction of completion and extension of it. By observing what possibilities there are of greater divergence from the arrangements and habits of the past, we shall see what modifications are probable.

Many acts that are normal with the uncivilized are, with the civilized, transgressions and crimes. Promiscuity, once unchecked, has been more and more reprobated as societies have progressed; abduction of women, originally honorable, is now criminal; the marrying of two or more wives, allowable and creditable in inferior societies, has become in superior societies felonious. Hence, future evolution, along lines thus far followed, may be expected to extend the monogamic relation by extinguishing promiscuity, and by suppressing such crimes as bigamy and adultery. Dying out of the mercantile element in marriage may also be inferred. After wife-stealing came wife-purchase; and then followed the usages which made, and continue to make, considerations of property predominate over considerations of personal preference. Clearly, wife-purchase and husband-purchase (which exists in some semi-civilized societies), though they have lost their original gross forms, persist in disguised forms. Already some